From the perspective of the day-working population, daytime television is like a rough neighborhood or your mom’s favorite spinster aunt: You hear about it all the time, but you don’t visit.
This arms-length stance makes sense. Not only are the logistics tricky, but there are bad things happening there, things like carjacking and marzipan and, in the case of daytime TV, all that human detritus on display in the teens-who-date-their-siblings talk shows.
The guests on those programs aren’t much, either.
So most people come to understand day TV through Time magazine trend pieces and the few scandals that manage to trickle out into the nighttime world.
But while you’ve been tut-tutting over randy Bob Barker’s intentions toward one of his game show’s product displayers, or confidently bemoaning the serial injustice done toward Susan Lucci by that sinister awards show, daytime TV has been undergoing a mini-revolution.
How do we know this?
Because daytime TV tells us so, asserting with a spate of new programs that it’s taking a cue from the products that dominate its commercial minutes and cleaning up its act, stepping out of the mudbath of the more base human behaviors (soap operas and trash talk shows) and toward a sort of grin-provoking waterslide (cheery new game shows and new-format, comedian-hosted talk shows).
The new has hardly overwhelmed the old. Soaps and “Springer” wallow on, and the relatively high-toned Phil Donahue has departed the scene. But with Oprah Winfrey turning her top-rated talk show into a respectable issues-and-celebrity hour, and NBC offering Leeza Gibbons’ program and the supercilious magazine show “Real Life,” a beachhead for decency has been established.
Two new standard-bearers in this movement are daily talk hours that debuted this week, ABC’s dishwater-dull “Caryl and Marilyn: Real Friends” (10 a.m. weekdays, WLS-Ch. 7) and the syndicated, surprisingly sparkling “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” (1 p.m. weekdays, WMAQ-Ch. 5).
“Caryl and Marilyn” demonstrates the darkside of cleaned-up talk TV–namely that it can get as insipid as, oh, say, a demonstration that one can cook barbecued chicken by wrapping the glazed raw bird in tinfoil and newspapers and walking around with it in a zipped-shut backpack for two hours. It can also be as mindless as a movie-critic contributor who acknowledges she hasn’t seen “The Rock,” then in the next breath calls it “really good escapist fare.”
“C&M” stars Caryl Kristensen and Marilyn Kentz, two mothers whose comedy act started, they say, when they met as neighbors in a suburban California cul-de-sac. They went on to star in the short-lived and ill-reviewed sitcom “The Mommies” for NBC.
Their new effort is executive produced by Stuart Krasnow, who was behind the success (and the sleaze) of Ricki Lake’s talk show. There, he patronized the uneducated. Here, he does the same for the suburban mother.
What Krasnow seems to have in mind is an expanded version of that fading institution, the stay-at-home moms’ midday coffee klatch, sprinkled with an ultra-mild version of pop-cult kitsch. But his show spends far too much time among the self-help books.
The point of all the guests seems to be to pepper with advice the show’s apparently inept target audience, offering everything from the aforementioned stupid chicken trick to segments on how to love your teenager, how to talk sexier and how to buy blue jeans for problem bodies.
The segments that try to be fun aren’t. “Actor/environmentalist” Ed Begley Jr. drives up in an electric car, and it’s covered–get this–in a leopard-skin print. Three panelists, a psychic, a psychologist, and a gossip writer, issue predictions about celebrity relationships, and the hosts take it all too seriously.
Kentz and Kristensen know which mall parking space their minivan occupies. From the outset, they’re making assertions such as, “We do that in the suburbs, though, don’t we?”
But beyond the easy cultural tags, they aren’t nearly nimble enough as hosts or comedians to pull off the kitsch and klatch act. Without a script to work from they descend quickly into banalities, like this snippet from day one:
Caryl: “We love to nest.”
Marilyn: “Oh, loving, nesting. I just get all warm when I buy something.”
“This show is all about validation,” was Caryl’s comment Tuesday, implying that the show believes its viewers need validation from a television program.
What it’s really all about, though, is target marketing. And good comedy doesn’t come from careful aiming at a niche.
It comes from a perceptive personality engaging with the world, which is where Rosie O’Donnell comes in.
O’Donnell, in her days as a ubiquitous host on the VH-1 music channel, struck me as something of an overbearing, barking boor.
Her talk show proves me dead-dog wrong. In her first week of shows she is hosting a truly revolutionary daytime hour.
For starters, she doesn’t begin with the premise that her viewers are women whose brains are 92 percent occupied with getting whites their whitest. Jokes for the culturally attuned abound, and O’Donnell, to whom pop culture is a bubble bath, displays a facile wit, reeling off references to Letterman, to “Sesame Street,” Doc Severinsen, Kathie Lee Gifford, Dana Carvey and many more.
O’Donnell’s fan side leads her to drop a few too many names: She mentions her friendship with Madonna in the first moment and seems to take it for granted that her audience is intimately familiar with her motion picture resume. It lets her let singer Toni Braxton get away with moving her lips as a recording of one of her records fills the studio.
But this fandom also helps O’Donnell celebrate the arcania of popular culture. Her first day interview with Lucci showed she watches “All My Children” religiously (what a contrast from isolated Dave or question-reading Jay), and an audience segment saw her challenging the crowd to name a post-1970s TV show whose theme she could not sing. It took “Mr. Belvedere” to beat her.
Meanwhile–and this is what really elevates this program–O’Donnell the comedian, the professional deflater, unhesitatingly takes on the dumb reverence for things commercial and celebrity that talk shows often demonstrate.
With guest Penny Marshall, in a segment Caryl and Marilyn should watch if they want to see real friends being really funny together, O’Donnell trades jabs at Kmart and the ads for the chain they do together.
O’Donnell: “Oh, Pen, why did we get into that?”
Marshall: “For money.”
Without seeming to force the issue, her frequent and funny ad-libs clue viewers in to the workings of a talk show. On day two she mentioned that she was told she was too loud for TV on day one. She also let viewers know that Jay Leno called her producer to complain that O’Donnell had done an impression of him on the “Today Show.”
“It’s just a little comedy,” she said, addressing Leno. “Remember? Comedy?”
The show is patterned after Jay and Dave and Conan: bandleader (hers makes Paul Shaffer seem sincere), monologue, celebrity guests. It’s got an ex-Lettermanite, Daniel Kellison, as executive producer. And despite the similarities, it would seem fresh and funny nestled among those programs.
Amid the rest of daytime TV, it’s a veritable masterpiece. Too bad “Springer” comes on afterward.
